Auto Suggestions are available once you type at least 3 letters. Use up arrow (for mozilla firefox browser alt+up arrow) and down arrow (for mozilla firefox browser alt+down arrow) to review and enter to select.

Hardcover

Temporarily Out of Stock Online

Overview

Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China by Robert Ford Campany

In this book, the first comprehensive study in a Western language of the zhiguai genre in its formative period, Company sets forth a new view of the nature of the genre and the reasons for its emergence.

About the Author

Robert Ford Campany is Associate Professor in the Departments of Religious Studies and East Asian Languages and Cultures at Indiana University.

Table of Contents

Preface

1 Anomaly and Cosmography in Comparative Perspective

Part One. The Texts and Their World

2 Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China: Genre and Texts

3. Justifying the Strange: The Warrant for the Genre of Anomaly Accounts

4. The Making of the Texts: Who, How, Why

Part Two. Interpretive Perspectives

5 The Description and Narration of Anomaly: Cosmographic Poetics

6 Modes of Anomaly: Cosmographic Logic

7 Strange Persuasions: Cosmographic Rhetoric

8 Reciprocity across Boundaries: Cosmographic Ethics

Postscript

Appendix

List of Works Cited

List of Citations of Primary Texts

Index

Editorial Reviews

This is a thorough, highly readable, and interesting description of zhiguai texts. It is a first-rate book, insightful and well-writtena book that is a pleasure to read straight through and to consult for specific points of information and interpretation in the future.”  John S. Major, author of Heaven and Earth in Early Han Thought

“This is a brilliantly strange work. I say ‘strange’ in that it is a splendidly unconventional and provocative work that is not about just this or that. The book has, in fact, the potential for moving some of the current stolid theoretical discourse concerning Chinese studies and the history of religions in new and creative directions.”  Norman Girardot, Lehigh University